Social media can be a noisy place. With millions of people, companies, news sites and more posting multiple times per day, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. But within this deluge of information there are customer voices and opinions that can be teased out if you know how to look for them.
Our latest report used Talkwalker social media analytics to examine customer conversations surrounding the world’s 40 largest airlines including United, Lufthansa and EasyJet to explain just how this can be done. Here are some of the top tips from the report plus a bonus look at the world’s most popular holiday destinations…
By searching for mentions of airline brands in combination with words like “I”, “I’m”, “Im” and “I am” businesses can isolate those conversations that express a personal opinion. With this information at hand airlines can see the sentiment towards their brand on specific flight issues:
(Customer sentiment towards flight services of the world’s 40 largest airlines over the last 30 days)
Specific aspects of flight services can also be compared against competitors. Using this information, airlines can work towards improving customer satisfaction by creating a unique customer experience and differentiate themselves from the competition on factors other than price.
(Customer sentiment towards customer service of U.S. Airlines over the last 30 days)
Influencers are a key part of marketing in any industry and airlines are no different. Using social media analytics brands can not only identify key influencers but go one step further and understand their interests and activities on social channels.
(Influencer tweet (left) and top themes linked to this influencers Twitter feed (right))
Using this information, they can then target these key figures with personalized rewards and turn industry influencers into brand ambassadors.
Social networks are a hotbed of customer opinion about airlines but sometimes specialized discussions take place on a different media channels. By tracking specialist forums such as flyertalk.com in the airlines industry, brands can see what matters to their most important customers.
(Most discussed topics on flyertalk.com forums over the last 30 days)
Using these key insights, airlines can focus their rewards and loyalty schemes, keep hold of their biggest customers and maximize upsell opportunities.
Previously we've looked at how organizations like the Bank of England are using social media analytics to try and predict economic trends. Using advanced social listening techniques, we can also uncover other predictive customer insights such as where people want to go on holiday. To examine this, we looked at unique tweets (i.e. excluding retweets) in English over the last 3 months for the 40 most visited countries in the world to see where people are saying they want to visit ahead of the holiday season. Here are the top 10:
(Top 10 holiday destinations according to Twitter (left) and most visited countries in 2014 (right))
As we are tracking English results, there is naturally somewhat of a bias towards opinions of English speaking nations, particularly the US. But the high position of Japan and Australia may be interesting news for travel operators, airlines and national tourist agencies alik,e as neither country is even in the top 20 of the most visited in the world. This shows that people are more likely to discuss the places they actually want to visit on Twitter rather than the places they can realistically visit.
The theme cloud of the top topics linked to a desire to visit Japan includes “anime”, an example of how key cultural exports can impact how much people want to visit a certain country. Such insights also provide travel agencies and tourist offices with ideas on how to create campaigns that will entice particular customer segments.
For all businesses, nothing is more important than what customers and clients think of your product or service. By using advanced social media analytics, airlines and companies in all industries can now find pivotal customer insights in social data and use them to make a tangible difference to customer satisfaction.
To find out more about exactly how to find and benefit from social customer insights in the airlines industry read the full report in the Talkwalker Academy.
